Use this form if the comment contains offensive or otherwise
inappropriate content. An email message will be sent to our
moderators who will take appropriate action if necessary.

Write your message to the moderator below:

(Enter the numbers exactly as they appear to the left)

Comment text appears below:Hi everyone. Thanks for reading.

crabarts231 - it really depends on the content you're watching and the room you're watching it in. The higher levels of DynamicBlack will dim brightness more than the lower levels, so unless your room is dark and non-reflective enough to eliminate ambient light, the downsides may outweigh the benefits.

Robert - obviously this depends on the projector in question. I have yet to see a trustworthy source for long-term lamp dimming that is generalizable across all projectors, but it is clear that many projector lamps lose a chunk of brightness in their first 100 hours and then gradually fade from that point. With our specific comparison (Epson 5030UB versus Optoma HD91), I don't think the cross-over point exists.

The problem with long-term testing (and the reason why we haven't done something like this already) is that you need to maintain a normal pattern of use for your data to be meaningful. In other words, we can't just burn the lamp for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and expect to get results that are applicable to typical home use. Instead, we'd have to turn the projector on for smaller periods of time (say, 2 to 4 hours at a stretch), then turn it off and allow it to cool down before starting it up again. This takes a lot more time than just running the projector all day. If we used a "six hours on, six hours off" schedule on a projector with a lamp life of 4,000 hours, it would take just under a year to exhaust the lamp's life span.

Still, it is a topic that we are interested in, and we will likely write more about the differences between mercury lamps and alternative light sources in the future.

Edgar_in_Indy - To our knowledge, the projectors that suffer the largest light loss are hybrids -- those that use a combination of LED and laser sources. Pure LED projectors have less brightness but also lose less light output over their lives. Some estimates (unconfirmed) put total brightness loss of LEDs at 30% over the entire specified lifespan, and that loss is heavily weighted towards the end.